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Category: washi tape

What a night, what a surprise! I got this surprise night gifted to my 30th birthday. I had no idea what this night would bring. My friend picked me up and we ate at my favorite restaurant. Afterwards she even put a sleeping mask on my face, so I wouldn’t see, where we were going. It was a fabulous surprise.
We saw the unbelievable wonderful a-capella choir Perpetuum Jazzile live in concert. If you never heard of them, please watch this video. This is the one song, that got them famous. Now they travel the world.

The book I used as minialbum, was a little journal with golden stars printed on every page. It was much too thick to add the photos, so I ripped a third of the pages out from the middle. That way the book with the photos was almost as thick as original. At the end of the book I added a CD with videos and music from the concert, thus I have everything together when I want to reminisce about this amazing night.

In 2012 I stumbled upon the Sketchbook Project. If you haven’t heared about it, it’s a collection of sketchbooks all in one library and made by you. To be exact, you order an official sketchbook on their website and when it arrives, you fill it up with your sketches, collages or whatever comes into your mind. When you are done, you send it back and it will be catalogued and can be viewed by anyone visiting the library on the internet, if you choose the digital version too. The little library of The Sketchbook Project is mobile and travels through the USA and sometimes even around the world.

When I ordered a sketchbook of my own, I was simply curious, what I would come up with. Since you don’t have a set theme to work around, you are free to choose whatever you want. You can even rip it apart and stitch it together, if you want to. It took me a long time to choose a theme, but when I found it (“Create & Capture”), I finshed the sketchbook within two weeks. And I came up with totally new ideas and styles of collages for me. It was like a journey to know myself better. I posted every page in 2012 on the blog, but since the pages look like an art journal and the photos are way too small, I thought it would be fun to share them again with you in a single post, all together.

If you are interested to participate in the Sketchbook Project yourself, you can order your sketchbook here.

In November I had a low, thanks to the darkness and my thyroid problem. To get myself out of this low and focus on the good things in my life, I made this little minialbum or notebook. I put it on my nightstand and as soon as I would go to bed, I would write everything down, that made me feel good on this day. It helped getting me to sleep with positive thoughts in my mind and maybe even let me sleep a little better. After a month the pages were filled with positivity and good thoughts. I felt better thanks to the medicine and Christmas time, so I didn’t fill it up with new pages. But I really liked it. Maybe in time I will do it again.

For the minialbum I used mostly Project Life cards from Stampin’Up and made some myself with stickers and washi tape. The minialbum is 4’’x4” and has around 30 pages.

When we finally started into our vacation this summer, I wanted to be able to do a bit of art journaling. The problem was, I didn’t want to take a whole lot of crafty stash with me. Mainly because we were traveling on bike and I had no space in my bike bags for anything else than the necessary. The only option was a notebook, because it was small enough.

Therefore I started to collect title snippets from magazines, that spoke to me and put them into the lovely notebook ‘More ideas than time’ by SODAlicious. Here you can see the mess, I made on our bed. I used the washi tape to support the colors of the text scraps and get something like a design on the pages. All I took with me on our vacation, was this travel art journal, some pens (black sharpie, thin black pen and neon sharpies) and two roles of washi tape, just in case. I never missed anything. All I needed was my travel art journal and a pen to keep me going. I even journaled on the beach.

You can see some of the filled pages here and here. If you have any questions, leave a comment or write
an email to blog (a) momentstolivefor.com.

My newest mini album creation. It is one of those projects I started over a year ago but only finished now. Last year I had the idea to use neon in a minialbum and created pages in 4×6 size from grey cardboard for it. Then I used neon tapes (in orange, pink and green) and neon markers to draw patterns on the pages. Sometimes messy, sometimes almost ordered. Because I hadn’t any specific photos in mind to fill in, I created a whole bunch of pages, not knowing how much I would need.

The pages sat almost a year in my backlog until I stumbled about the photos of my 31th birthday party with the photo booth. Perfect for this fun kind of mini. Additionally I found this beautiful neon rainbow string to bind the mini with the japanese stab binding. Although I changed the traditional way up and did it with five holes. I knotted the long loose ends of the string along the book spine with simple knots. Everytime I met a string crossing the spine I integrated it into the knot, therefore the knot string is fixed at the spine. Really treasure this little fun minialbum.

Do you have any questions? Tell me in the comments. Here you can find more minialbums.

Bookmarks are something I never have around. For long times my boyfriend and I used paper scraps like bills to mark our reading process. Therefore I wanted to make bookmarks for us, to have something beautiful in hand while reading.

For this bookmark I used three different kinds of washi tapes, all in red and white to be consistent, white cardboard, white ribbon and the beautiful little labels of Ormolu.

I hand cut a paper card from the cardboard, taped three stripes of washi tape in the middle and two on the edge and taped the overlapping rest to the back. Then I cut one label out and used photo glue pads to attach it to the middle of the bookmark.

To secure the ribbon, I punched a hole into the upper end of the bookmark with my Crop-A-Dile Punch (from We R Memory Keepers). Then I pulled the closed end of the double layed ribbon through the little hole and afterwards the open ends through the loop and pulled till it was fixed. Later I tied a knot in the open end of the ribbon, so the ribbon doesn’t hang loose.

Wednesday was one of those days when everything was somehow grey and went wrong. To have at least something beautiful at the end of the day, I made a cover for my new blog notebook. For that I used one of my new washi tapes. When I saw the new collection of tapes, I just couldn’t resist. I had to have them. They are so pretty!

On Friday we went to the funeral of my boyfriend’s uncle. It was so sad and rained through the entire ceremony. As if the sky was crying too. After these emotional days and eight hours on the road in our car, I had to do something creative, to relax and get my balance back. It ended with a lot of cleaned brushes. I painted two hooks with nut brown stain for our bathroom. They are not finished yet, because they will get little embellishments in light colors.

Moreover I had finally an idea for the three canvases, that waited to be painted for some time now. First I jotted some ideas down on paper, before I chose two designs. The third is still undecided. They will get little gold details later, when I have the time again. Tomorrow and Wednesday I will be away on a business trip. Maybe I have some photos to share with you afterwards.

After these text heavy posts, I thought it was time for another photo post. So here are some shots from my craft table. Tables I have to say, because this time I used our large kitchen table too, to paint all of my wooden boxes with a dark walnut-brown stain.

At a local do-it-yourself store I found wooden boxes in different sizes, which fit perfectly into my Ivar shelves to organize my crafty things. I just have to paint them with stain, so they look more beautiful. But that’s only a matter of time, although there are seven big and eight middle sized boxes waiting to be painted. Yikes! But until then I’ve already tested, if all of my stamps and washi tapes fit in there. And they do, perfectly. Although I was a little shocked seeing how much stamps and tapes I’ve got! Is it already an addiction?

Sadly, I can’t get anymore stamps from Elise Blaha. The package arrived of her last sale in her shop. Really, really sorry, that there will be no more. Loved her style on stamps. And truthfully, she started this obsession with text stamps. It’s a good thing, there is no more room in this box for more.

In the meantime I bought two amazing magazines. Wanted to just pick up the new Uppercase magazine and stumpled about Frankie. Such a lovely, creative, beautiful magazine. I’m amazed, that I’ve never heard of it before. And I started a logbook, thanks to Austin Kleon’s book “Steal like an Artist“. It’s a motivating and helpful little book. Read it, it’s fun!

And that’s how it looks, when I try to make a photo for the blog. Finchen is instantly in the picture. Nosy little cat.

Inspired by these beautiful black & white Project Life cards and postcards, I designed my own set of PL cards. Last year I was in a Project Life hype. I loved the possibilities to capture our everyday so simple and fast in a PL album. And even more than that, I liked the idea of creating my own PL cards. You can see my first set of PL cards here. At the end of the year I got lots of new stamps from Elise Blaha-Cripe (no longer available), Bananafishstudio and I lowe Scrap. I treasure these stamps. And they are perfect for Project Life. So I started to make this card set.

As basis for the cards, I cut 3×4 in white cards from simple card stock. Then I used the lovely stamps and stamped on white and black cardboard with StazOn White and Black ink pad. With two different hole punchers (1” and 2’’) and some manual cutting with scissors I cut the circles. For the different backgrounds I used my beloved black & white washi tapes and black & white ink pens. The last step was to cut the corners with my corner rounder of We R Memory Keepers. And that’s it. It took me only one evening to finish the entire set.

Although the last weeks were mostly filled with putting up new furnitures and working at my new job, I managed to craft almost every day a little bit. Here you can see some of the things that wandered through my hands the last weeks.

I used the chance to organize my craft table new, so I had more space to work and for example get an overview of all the missing pens. My cats love the empty space on my desk and sit most of the time next to me, watching carefully what I’m doing. As long as they don’t run over the still wet surfaces of something painted or glued, I love to have them by my side.

Although I love my iPhone and find it more than useful for many, many things, I still need a physical notebook to write my thoughts and ideas down. I love the feeling of a pen and paper and therefore I always carry at least one with me. The covers of these two notebooks I decorated with washi tape. One is my private everyday notebook, the one with the triangles, the other is for my notes at the office. Moleskine notebooks are my absolute favorites, perfect size and not too many pages. I don’t like to write into one for too long. I just need a change of scenery from time to time.

Two weeks ago I decided to try one of those DIY’s of my ever growing collection on Pinterest in the sense of ‘stop pinnning, start making’! The ‘decorative power cord‘ idea is from the inspirational Bri from Designlovefest. I had this DIY on my mind for some time. Sadly after only two days the ends of the tape didn’t stick anymore. If you have an idea, how to fix this, please write to me. The power cord of my iPhone is so pretty, I want that it stays this way.

This is a minialbum I crafted for friends I left behind in Bremen. It contains 1000 little beautiful moments I had with them in the last four years, recorded on 1000 photos. It was such a fun time with them… really miss them.